Please see official solicitation # 1B-13-A-0003 on fbo.gov for documentation and instructions

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The internet continues to transform how we do business and communicate with one another, and citizens are increasingly looking to the Federal Government to provide services online. This need is often addressed by agencies offering citizens access to applications by means of usernames and passwords. While this enables agencies to provide some online government services, it creates a burden to the citizen to manage a username and password for each agency application they need to access - as well as a costly burden on each agency to issue and manage these usernames and passwords.Moreover, many high-value Federal applications cannot be put online because passwords do not provide a high enough level of assurance; the next generation of online government applications will require multi-factor authentication.

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), signed by the President in April of 2011, seeks to help address this issue. The Strategy's vision is: "individuals and organizations utilize secure, efficient, easy-to-use, and interoperable identity solutions to access online services in a manner that promotes confidence, privacy, choice, and innovation." The NSTIC calls for Federal Agencies to be early adopters of the Identity Ecosystem envisioned in NSTIC, calling on agencies to "lead by example and implement the Identity Ecosystem for the services it provides internally and externally."Agencies have been challenged in this to date, however, due to technical, policy and cost barriers that have made it challenging to accept third-party credential providers accredited by the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management (FICAM) initiative.

In response, the White House created a Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX) Tiger Team, co-chaired by NSTIC NPO and FICAM, which is governed by the General Services Administration (GSA). The FCCX Tiger Team consisted of a group of representatives from agencies that have a large population of external customers accessing their applications. This group was tasked with supporting the implementation of NSTIC and continuing progress to help Executive Branch Agencies align with Trust Framework Solutions (TFS) under the FICAM initiative.

The FCCX Tiger Team identified requirements, a technical architecture, and a set of implementation recommendations for an enterprise, cloud-based service that can provide all Federal agencies with an ability to accept the full range of FICAM-approved third-party credentials for online services for citizens. The creation of FCCX will support agencies in meeting the goals of NSTIC and FICAM, being early adopters of strong federated identity solutions, and improving security, privacy and convenience for U.S. citizens. Moreover, FCCX will enable agencies to more easily offer online a variety of citizen-facing services that are currently mired in the paper world.

To validate the requirements developed and gauge from industry suppliers how they might implement a privacy-enhancing, cloud-based, federated credential exchange service the FCCX Tiger Team hosted an Industry Day on August 7th, 2012 along with a request to suppliers to respond to market research questions.The responses helped to further refine the requirements and implementation strategy.

In November, 2012, the United States Postal Service (USPS) was chosen to implement and operate a pilot version of FCCX on behalf of the Federal Government.The FCCX pilot process will be led by the USPS Digital Solutions Group (DSG). The DSG was established to identify, develop and bring to market digital offerings that can enhance the value of the USPS, its products and services, and spur the growth of American commerce. In doing so, the DSG will help ensure the long term relevance and ability of the USPS to provide digital services to the citizens. The DSG operates within an innovations structure that leverages leading private sector practices and ensures effective integration with internal management, marketing and technology initiatives.

USPS will be issuing a competitive solicitation for the FCCX pilot. The solicitation will be released within the next two weeks. The timeline will be very aggressive. Proposal responses will be due three weeks from solicitation issuance date. Supplier demonstrations/oral presentations will be scheduled in late January with contract award in February 2013.

Since you are a new supplier to the USPS, we also wanted to provide you a link to our web page dedicated to suppliers and point you to our Supplying Principles and Practices which outline our sourcing processes so you can begin getting familiar with our processes.

We realize that this solicitation is occurring over the holiday period but appreciate you and your company's full support to make this a success. Please contact me via email at angela.m.lagneaux@usps.gov and copy to my Contracting Officer, Cindy Miller, at cindy.d.miller@usps.gov with any questions.

Added: Dec 28, 2012 5:37 pm

****PLEASE NOTE****

In preparation of the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX) solicitation release within the next few days, please see the attached DRAFT copy of the FCCX Statement of Objectives (SOO) and the associated DRAFT Appendix A, Requirements Matrix. This draft version has been provided for the purpose of allowing offerors the opportunity to start building their technical proposals.

Any future changes to these two documents, if any, will be minor when the official solicitation package is released. All changes and/or edits will be identified from the draft to the official SOO and Requirements Matrix.***********************************************************